Experimental and Theoretical Analysis on Thermal Performance of the Flat Plate Solar Air Collector.

Experimental and Theoretical investigation is presented to simulate the heat transfer in flat-plate single pass solar air collector working in forced convection. The complexity of the mathematical models of these phenomena has led researchers to conduct studies related to this field based on several simplifying assumptions, such as, the convective heat transfer coefficient is considered as constant. In this research work, initially, an experimental study is performed using thermocouples to measure temperature distributions on solar air heater components. The different measured temperatures of the absorber plate, air flow and bottom plate are used to determine the local convective heat transfer coefficients. Secondly, the problem is treated numerically by a developed FORTRAN code to calculate, for different solar radiation intensity, the temperature variations in each solar air panel components. Satisfactory qualitative and quantitative agreement is obtained between the numerical and experimental results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]